Over the nearly two decades that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has spent inventing things, he’s figured out that one of the most important ingredients of new ideas is something closer to play—experiments taken on not to profit immediately, or to develop a product, but because they’re flat-out fascinating. It’s what he figured out at MIT Media Lab, where he first became Internet Famous after his correspondence with a Nike customer service representative over getting the word “sweatshop” stitched into his sneakers went viral.

Last week, Time Inc. erected a paywall at Entertainment Weekly in what it says is the first of more to come for its titles. Others will follow this summer. Time Inc. is struggling to turn around its revenue declines and gain the confidence of Wall Street, so it needs to use all the levers it has. Many publishers have already begun doing the same: In a survey of its members a year ago, 95 percent of members of the trade association Digital Content Next had a paid subscription strategy.

Wary of a fickle ad market, many publishers have been trying to lean more heavily on subscribers for revenue in recent years. TheStreet has done the same, though its market—Wall Street—and its products—investment advice—make the company a unique test case.

Shareable, native stories and video are undoubtedly the stars of mobile content right now.
And as more readers find news through social platforms, media outlets find they have to equip themselves to “hunt for news audiences” on various platforms .

Climb up three steps from The Washington Post’s fifth-floor newsroom to the sixth floor, then head down two flights of steps via a wrought iron staircase. There, you’ll find Team Rainbow. It’s a collaborative place for development, news and tech, and it’s where the Post’s latest Web experiment came from.

Interactive storytelling takes traditional elements of journalism — words, pictures, data, videos, etc. — and uses web technologies to blend them into an immersive and unique online experience, often allowing the audience to interact with the content.

“Based on the success of our new tablet app, we decided to experiment with different ways to carry that experience to the Web,” said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. “We think it could be an excellent way to both provide users of the app a seamless experience as they navigate to the web, and to continue expanding our national and global audience, particularly among Millennials, whose readership of The Post is growing steadily.”

The New York Times will take another step in its effort to prioritize digital this week by moving the discussion of the print edition out of its daily news meetings, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in a memo to staff on Tuesday.

Among traditional publishing companies, few have the journalistic heft of The New York Times. The 163-year-old institution has long had a strong moat around its newsroom to protect its journalistic integrity from business influences.